When once I asked the agent of a notorious Fourth Ward alley how many people might be living in it I was told: One hundred and forty families, one hundred Irish, thirty-eight Italian, and two that spoke the German tongue. Barring the agent herself, there was not a native-born individual in the court. The answer was characteristic of the cosmopolitan character of lower New York, very nearly so of the whole of it, wherever it runs to alleys and courts. One may find for the asking an Italian, a German, a French, African, Spanish, Bohemian, Russian, Scandinavian, Jewish, and Chinese colony. Even the Arab, who peddles "holy earth" from the Battery as a direct importation from Jerusalem, has his

exclusive preserves at the lower end of Washington Street. The one thing you shall vainly ask for in the chief city of America is a distinctively American community. There is none; certainly not among the tenements. Where have they gone to, the old inhabitants? I put the question to one who might fairly
be presumed to be of the number, since I had found him
sighing for the "good old days" when the legend
"no Irish need apply" was familiar in the
advertising columns of the newspapers. He looked at
me with a puzzled air. "I don't know," he
said. "I wish I did. Some went to California in
'49, some to the war and never came back. The rest,
I expect, have gone to heaven, or somewhere. I don't
see them 'round here."

Whatever the merit of the good man's conjectures, his
eyes did not deceive him. They are not here. In their
place has come this queer conglomerate mass of heterogeneous
elements, ever striving and working like whiskey and
water in one glass, and with the like result: final
union and a prevailing taint of whiskey. The once unwelcome
Irishman has been followed in his turn by the Italian,
the Russian Jew, and the Chinaman, and has himself taken
a hand at opposition, quite as bitter and quite as ineffectual,
against these later hordes. Wherever these have gone
they have crowded him out, possessing the block, the
street, the ward with their denser swarms.

But the Irishman's revenge is complete. Victorious
in defeat over his recent as over his more ancient
foe, the one who opposed his coming no less
than the one who drove him out, he dictates
to both their politics, and, secure in possession
of the offices, returns the native his greeting
with interest, while collecting the rents of
the Italian whose house he has bought with the
profits of his saloon. As a landlord he is picturesquely
autocratic. An amusing instance of his methods
came under my notice while writing these lines.
An inspector of the Health Department found
an Italian family paying a man with a Celtic
name twenty-five dollars a month for three small
rooms in a ramshackle rear tenement--more than
twice what they were worth--and expressed his
astonishment to the tenant, an ignorant Sicilian
laborer. He replied that he had once asked the
landlord to reduce the rent, but he would not
do it.

"Well! What did he say?" asked the
inspector.

"'Damma, man!' he said; 'if you speaka
thata way to me, I fira you and your things
in the streeta.'" And the frightened Italian
paid the rent.

In justice to the Irish landlord it must be
said that like an apt pupil he was merely showing
forth the result of the schooling he had received,
re-enacting, in his own way, the scheme of the
tenements. It is only his frankness that shocks.
The Irishman does not naturally take kindly
to tenement life, though with characteristic
versatility he adapts himself to its conditions
at once. It does violence, nevertheless, to
the best that is in him, and for that very reason
of all who come within its sphere soonest corrupts
him. The result is a sediment, the product of
more than a generation in the city's slums,
that, as distinguished from the larger body
of his class, justly ranks at the foot of tenement
dwellers, the so-called "low Irish."

It is not to be assumed, of course, that the whole body
of the population living in the tenements, of which
New Yorkers are in the habit of speaking vaguely as
"the poor," or even the larger part of
it, is to be classed as vicious or as poor in the sense
of verging on beggary.

New York's wage-earners have no other place to live,
more is the pity. They are truly poor for having no
better homes; waxing poorer in purse as the exorbitant
rents to which they are tied, as ever was serf to
soil, keep rising. The wonder is that they are not
all corrupted, and speedily, by their surroundings.
If, on the contrary, there be a steady working up,
if not out of the slough, the fact is a powerful argument
for the optimist's belief that the world is, after
all, growing better, not worse, and would go far toward
disarming apprehension, were it not for the steadier
growth of the sediment of the slums and its constant
menace. Such an impulse toward better things there
certainly is. The German rag-picker of thirty years
ago, quite as low in the scale as his Italian successor,
is the thrifty tradesman or prosperous farmer of to-day.
[1]

The Italian scavenger
of our time is fast graduating into exclusive
control of the corner fruit-stands, while his
black-eyed boy monopolizes the boot-blacking industry
in which a few years ago he was an intruder. The
Irish hod-carrier in the second generation has
become a bricklayer, if not the Alderman of his
ward, while the Chinese coolie is in almost exclusive
possession of the laundry business. The reason
is obvious. The poorest immigrant comes here with
the purpose and ambition to better himself and,
given half a chance, might be reasonably expected
to make the most of it. To the false plea that
he prefers the squalid houses in which his kind
are housed there could be no better answer. The
truth is, his half chance has too long been wanting,
and for the bad result he has been unjustly blamed.

As emigration from east to west follows the
latitude, so does the foreign influx in New
York distribute itself along certain well-defined
lines that waver and break only under the stronger
pressure of a more gregarious race or the encroachments
of inexorable business. A feeling of dependence
upon mutual effort, natural to strangers in
a strange land, unacquainted with its language and customs, sufficiently accounts for this.

The Irishman is the true cosmopolitan immigrant.
All-pervading, he shares his lodging with perfect
impartiality with the Italian, the Greek, and the
"Dutchman," yielding only to sheer force
of numbers, and objects equally to them all. A map
of the city, colored to designate nationalities, would
show more stripes than on the skin of a zebra, and
more colors than any rainbow. The city on such a map
would fall into two great halves, green for the Irish
prevailing in the West Side tenement districts, and
blue for the Germans on the East Side. But intermingled
with these ground colors would be an odd variety of
tints that would give the whole the appearance of
an extraordinary crazy-quilt. From down in the Sixth
Ward, upon the site of the old Collect Pond that in
the days of the fathers drained the hills which are
no more, the red of the Italian would be seen forcing,
its way northward along the line of Mulberry Street
to the quarter of the French purple on Bleecker Street
and South Fifth Avenue, to lose itself and reappear,
after a lapse of miles, in the "Little Italy"
of Harlem, east of Second Avenue. Dashes of red, sharply
defined, would be seen strung through the Annexed
District, northward to the city line. On the West
Side the red would be seen overrunning the old Africa
of Thompson Street, pushing the black of the negro
rapidly uptown, against querulous but unavailing protests,
occupying his home, his church, his trade and all,
with merciless impartiality. There is a church in
Mulberry Street that has stood for two generations
as a sort of milestone of these migrations. Built
originally for the worship of staid New Yorkers of
the "old stock," it was engulfed by the
colored tide, when the draft-riots drove the negroes
out of reach of Cherry Street and the Five Points.
Within the past decade the advance wave of the Italian
onset reached it, and to-day the arms of United Italy
adorn its front. The negroes have made a stand at
several points along Seventh and Eighth Avenues; but
their main body, still pursued by the Italian foe,
is on the march yet, and the black mark will be found
overshadowing to-day many blocks on the East Side,
with One Hundredth Street as the centre, where colonies
of them have settled recently.

Hardly less aggressive
than the Italian, the Russian and Polish Jew,
having over run the district between Rivington
and Division Streets, east of the Bowery, to the
point of suffocation, is filling, the tenements
of the old Seventh Ward to the river front, and
disputing with the Italian every foot of available
space in the back alleys of Mulberry Street. The
two races, differing hopelessly in much, have
this in common: they carry their slums with them
wherever they go, if allowed to do it. Little
Italy already rivals its parent, the "Bend,"
in foulness. Other nationalities that begin at
the bottom make a fresh start when crowded up
the ladder. Happily both are manageable, the one
by rabbinical, the other by the civil law. Between
the dull gray of the Jew, his favorite color,
and the Italian red, would be seen squeezed in
on the map a sharp streak of yellow, marking the
narrow boundaries of Chinatown.

Dovetailed in with the German population, the
poor but thrifty Bohemian might be picked out
by the sombre hue of his life as of his philosophy,
struggling against heavy odds in the big human
bee-hives of the East Side. Colonies of his people
extend northward, with long lapses of space, from
below the Cooper Institute more than three miles.
The Bohemian is the only foreigner with any considerable
representation in the city who counts no wealthy
man of his race, none who has not to work hard for a living,
or has got beyond the reach of the tenement. Down near
the Battery the West Side emerald would be soiled by
a dirty stain, spreading rapidly like a splash of ink
on a sheet of blotting paper, headquarters of the Arab
tribe, that in a single year has swelled from the original
dozen to twelve hundred, intent, every mother's son,
on trade and barter. Dots and dashes of color here and
there would show where the Finnish sailors worship their
djumala (God), the Greek pedlars the ancient name of
their race, and the Swiss the goddess of thrift. And
so on to the end of the long register, all toiling together
in the galling fetters of the tenement. Were the question
raised who makes the most of life thus mortgaged, who
resists most stubbornly its levelling tendency--knows
how to drag even the barracks upward a part of the way
at least toward the ideal plane of the home--the palm
must be unhesitatingly awarded the Teuton. The Italian
and the poor Jew rise only by compulsion. The Chinaman
does not rise at all; here, as at home, he simply remains
stationary. The Irishman's genius runs to public affairs
rather than domestic life; wherever he is mustered in
force the saloon is the gorgeous centre of political
activity. The German struggles vainly to learn his trick;
his Teutonic wit is too heavy, and the political ladder
he raises from his saloon usually too short or too clumsy
to reach the desired goal. The best part of his life
is lived at home, and he makes himself a home independent
of the surroundings, giving the lie to the saying, unhappily
become a maxim of social truth, that pauperism and drunkenness
naturally grow in the tenements. He makes the most of
his tenement, and it should be added that whenever and
as soon as he can save up money enough, he gets out
and never crosses the threshold of one again.

[1] The Sheriff Street Colony of
rag-pickers, long since gone, is an instance in
point. The thrifty Germans saved up money during
years of hard work in squalor and apparently wretched
poverty to buy a township in a Western State, and
the whole colony moved out there in a body. There
need be no doubt about their thriving there.